The Envelope My Girl Carried to the Dugout

“Give it here, honey,” Tawny said. “I go right by there. I’ll drop it in tomorrow on my way to work and bring you back the slip.”

Clara looked at me. I nodded. She is family. Clara handed her the coffee can with both hands, the way she handed it to everybody, like it was something that might spill.

Tawny never brought back the slip. Clara asked about it on Wednesday, and Tawny said she had it in her car somewhere. Clara asked again on Thursday, and Tawny said she would bring it Saturday to the game.

I should have heard it then. I did not. I was thinking about lunch counts and harvest and whether Burl’s truck needed tires before winter.

I thought a deposit slip was the kind of thing that gets lost in a car.

So that Friday, after Gail walked away down the hallway, I went into the teachers’ workroom and called the bank on my lunch break.

They would not tell me anything about Gail’s account, which is right. But they told me nobody had come in on Monday with a coffee can.

The woman on the phone remembered, because a coffee can full of small bills is the sort of thing a teller remembers.

She said nobody had brought one in all week. She said it kindly, like she could hear what it meant.

I finished out the day. I do not remember much of it. I helped a little boy with his reading and walked a line of first graders out to the buses, and I smiled when I was supposed to smile.

At three thirty I drove to Tawny’s house. It was a bright afternoon, warm for the end of October, the cottonwoods along the creek gone yellow, and grain trucks were lined up out at the elevator the way they are every fall.

She was sitting on her front steps in her work clothes, still in her nursing home lanyard, with a piece of paper in her lap. She saw my car pull in and she did not get up.

I got out and walked up the sidewalk and stood at the bottom of her steps. I did not say anything at first.

I just looked at the paper in her hands, which was pink, the color a shutoff notice comes in.

“The power district is cutting me off Tuesday,” she said, before I could ask. “I called them. They said pay it all or they come out. It was four hundred and some with the late fees.”

“So you paid it with Clara’s can,” I said.

She would not look at me. She looked out at the street. A kid went by on a bike with a dog running beside him, and she watched them all the way to the corner.

“I told myself I’d put it back before anybody knew,” she said. “I get paid on the fifteenth. I was going to go in on the fifteenth and deposit the whole four eighty and nobody would ever be the wiser.”

“Gail’s taking Addie to Lincoln on Monday,” I said. “The fifteenth is two weeks off.”

“I know that.”

“Does she know that? Did you think about her on that road with no gas money?”

Tawny started crying then, not loud, just her face folding up. I want to be fair to her, because I have been short before too, and I know what that pink paper does to a person. I know how it feels to lie awake doing math.